Notes On Content

Bits in salmon-pink are later additions, notes or further information supplied by others.

Bits in Khaki-green are 'work-in-progress' listings and anyone is welcome to add missing details, whether single items or whole chunks.

All photographs are 6.5 (old Fuji), 8.3 (Samsung) or 16 (new Nikon) Mpx, and most will blow up to greater than screen size if you hover on them and click. However I've noticed some of the older images aren't enlarging, this is probably a Blogger/Picasa/date/traffic/auto-archive thing?

If you think you can add some information, or identify any of the 'unknowns', please use the comment feature rather than emailing me.

Please report any dead links, and suggest any links you think should/could be added.

NoteI have now found out how to switch-off the slide-show thingy, so just clicking on the photographs will open them on a whole page where most will then enlarge further with another click - if the cursor is in a 'plus' sign.

This doesn't seem to work for some of the older posts, this is a Blogger/Internet coding change thing I can do nothing about, one day I'll update or replace the more important ones but that's years away.

Manufacturers A-Z

About Me

I’m a 51-year-old Aspergic CAD-Monkey. Sardonic, cynical and with the political leanings of a social reformer, I’m also a toy and model figure collector, particularly interested in the history of plastics and plastic toys. Other interests are history, current affairs, modern art, and architecture, gardening and natural history. I love plain chocolate, fireworks and trees but I don’t hug them, I do hug kittens. I hate ignorance, when it can be avoided, so I hate the 'educational' establishment and pity the millions they’ve failed with teaching-to-test and rote 'learning' and I hate the short-sighted stupidity of the entire ruling/industrial elite, with their planet destroying fascism and added “buy-one-get-one-free”. I also have no time for fools and little time for the false crap we're all supposed to pretend we haven't noticed, or the games we're supposed to play.

Friday, December 25, 2015

It's bad isn't it...hopefully it's as bad as a cracker joke! Well...stuffed (or well-stuffed) to the gunnel on roast duck and tangerine sauce, started on the liqueurs, saved this - from the flats Brian practically gave me in May - for today!

There are a couple of pieces missing from the set, an angel, another camel and a donkey I think, and they didn't photograph well, but it's a seasonal post, so there it is! Makes you wonder why no one does this sort of stuff now, electronic toys, the Internet and smart-fones might have replace elder kids toys, but I'm sure younger kids would collect something like this if it was in their favourite cereal, sweet or biscuit brand in the run-up to Christmas?

Thursday, December 24, 2015

I don't know if matey ever got his answer, but the missing SPG turned-up! Still sealed from the day it left Boca Raton, why not celebrate the season with a chunk of self-propelled artillery! It's stated as being an M110 8" Self-propelled Howitzer, I wonder if they did the 'Long' version (M107 175 mm) as well?

In the packing, carded with a hole for a rack-hook, the shrink wrapping is slowly pulling the card in on itself as the plastic tries to return to a molten blob - exercising the 'shape memory of thermoplastics - so I've whipped it off the card and I think I'll try and get a plaster-cast of it in the new year...add a bit of concrete hardener, clean it up with a mini-drill and paint in detail...it might work?

Not a bad little model, 7 pieces, with the running-gear just pinned and glued to the sides of the AFV. The lack of a crew compartment is a major over-simplification, although that's offset by the fact that the tracks are a cut above the usual 'ready-made' efforts, even some contemporary models. As you can see: the gun elevates and the cradle rotates through 360º (more than the 'real life' service vehicle!) but the recoil spade is a fixed element of the body-moulding.

This was loaded two days ago and I meant to publish it yesterday, but Vodafone (the princes of digital-darkness) had other ideas and an Internet Interregnum imposed itself on me for 24 hours...I swear Vodafone couldn't organise themselves out of an old paper bag with a sharpened, flaming, sledgehammer! But they'd still charge you!

The thing about this stuff we've been looking at for the last three weeks or so is that it's universal and never-ending. I popped round Mr. Morehead's yesterday (bit of in-hobby name dropping never hurt!) to pick-up the Hilco special which is available agian after selling-out at the show back in May, and he gave me a bag of bits with some flat charms (same source, three sets) I could add here, or use as a follow-up and that was just after I'd picked up a rubber alien catapult (you can't make it up when novelty shite's involved!) a few minutes earlier for a pound at a charity shop. It just never stops.

But there will be plenty of time to return to Aliens, flats, charms and etcetera! We haven't looked at the mass of Little Rubber guys who come in Gum Ball machines, larger animals, Ninja's, sea creatures, we've looked at some of what's out there, and rather than follow-ups, we'll look at the few bits I've got ready here and call it a day on these for now.

Musical instruments that don't play, one blow-moulded the other styrene, a mini whoopee-cushion, lucky horse-shoes (useful if GI Joe/Action Man is thinking of retraining as a blacksmith!), another chess piece, again - appearing without any of the other pieces - needed to make a game - having ever turning up!

Mirror, yo-yos, another rattle, soft plastic version of the metal wire-puzzles and soft plastic scissors! A magnet...another 'theme' we've not covered in these 50-odd posts, but we've looked at them elsewhere on the blog in the past.

The Quantas suitcase is interesting as presumably it was a re-packed rack-toy of dolls stuff re-branded to Quantas, given to kids to amuse them on long flights? Without the sticker it's just a cheap novelty suitcase, with the sticker it's a branded premium/giveaway!

More plastic tat, more rattles, another lenticular; this time just a very small picture - it's neither a badge nor a charm. A Britains flower-pot: plagurised, a polyethylene bat/gargoyle ring, more charms...The woodpecker toy, which normally comes as a finished toy with a stand and wooden pole was a gum-ball givaway..without instuctions or a pole, but is made to fit a pencil!

A tourist item, really outside the scope of these articles, but it was in the big lot and is a source of a plastic figure that - without it's die-cast mazak base - is just another piece of plastic kak. It must be quite common as it's the second one into the collection now, which is useful as I always hoped to get a second, so I could remove the figure and use it in some Ray Harryhausen type setting with some Greek Hoplites or a skeleton warrior? Statue of Liberty.

[Later the same day - Andrew Boyce suggested it might be from the Triang-Minic waterline ship range, and it is, so it doesn't really belong in these posts at all! But it's the second one I've seen displayed or sold as an ornament, so that's clearly it's fate...to be unrecognised as a toy, and written-off as a keepsake! I does however mean it's quite common and track-downable!]

Award cups...again we haven't looked at the various 'collectable' sets you could get, [American] football helmets, miniature baseball pennants and the like, I'm sure these come with lots of messages (here; 'golfer' and 'father'), and similar objets existed, but that'll do for tat, shite, caca for a while!

Well...for a day or two! I picked-up some nice figures in the 99p store the other day coming to a blog not a million miles from here in the next few days! Also got some contributions to come, some news, some follow-ups, a PW review, still got those bloody French articles in 'edit' and still got thousands of shots in Picasa, which I seem to add to quicker than I clear! And my 8-gig 'unknown' dongle has red-lined as I file these novelty images, so I need a 16-gig before I can clear the desk-top!

I had plans for a premium article with contributions for tomorrow, but Vodafone's upset the plan (like I ever have a 'plan'!), so we'll see, if I have a day or two off: may I extend my wishes for you to have a happy Christmas and thanks for watching! Now I'm a TV announcer!

Tuesday, December 22, 2015

As we saw with the supermarket set the other day, the mini tree crackers sometimes contain mini-novelties, and animals are one of the tropes that go way back to the little Scottie-dogs, poodles and black cats.

Top - Rockers, you get an animal, and a rocker, two-for-one and it came 'free' in a cheap cracker...bargain! Although you may remember when we looked at the dogs the other day, there was a rocker, that was an animal AND a charm, rendering these a bit of a swizz! Britians piracies for the most part?

Middle - With the exception of the yellow running horse and blue zebra-looking thing, these all seem to be Marx sculpts, from the various Miniature Masterpiece play sets with one of the 101 Dalmatians we looked at about a month ago.

Bottom - a few baksheesh ones, the sea-lion is a particularly good sculpt. The duck (with capsule) is also good - for Hong Kong.

Upper - A couple of Nosco or Nosco-knock-offs in a larger size bracket with a reasonable camel in a fetching pink polymer, the camels ethylene (as per all the previous), while the other two are styrene

Median - Mice

Lower - Cats, big cats. in different scales. The Sabre-tooth is a hollow moulding in the style of Hong Kong horses of the distinctive type that came with small-scale Cowboys & Indians, I have a Dimetrodon and a 'monster' in the same style somewhere. The orange one is another - albeit larger - Britains copy.

Monday, December 21, 2015

Yhep...practical! Who the hell wants something useful in their Christmas cracker? You want a frivolous piece of plastic tat to take the mickey out of, don't you? Some people!

Fish pen-knives were very common when I was a kid, and I think they still appear in mid-budget-range crackers, while the little yellow one is more of a novelty or blunt letter-opener! The tyre-compass is an unbranded scale-down of the branded ash-trays actual tyre manufacturers used to give out as promotional items, although this one's lost it's magnetism!

Nail clippers and nail files, still available in a box of crackers near you in the next week! The mini stacking-tower infant toy is here by default; it should be in one of the other posts, but got left out!

Sunday, December 20, 2015

Yes! Knowing that some of the stuff in this run-up to Christmas was really kak-caca and shity-shite from Tatty-tat Tattington, I tried to break the vehicles, figures and animals up into packages, to intersperse with the less interesting bits and bobs and tonight we reach the end of the automotive road as it where; with the last of the cars.

These are the 'mini's as opposed to the 'micro's and are a right old mix...as with the lorries there are more to look at another day, so just a brief flypast tonight. The green one is a common Hong Kong copy of the MPC Minis car, and I suspect the two open tops are as well?

The Citroen is marked 'France', and the other red one seems to go with the mini-truck fire-engines...it has the same wheels! We'll look at them all again!

Front is probably Blue Box, a hard polystyrene copy of Matchbox while the VW Beetle Coupé is early Manurba I think, one missing it's chassis and wheels may be a latter one by the same company or something completely different?

The red ones are three of ten from Kellogg's Cornflakes, issued in 1958, they were all British Motor Corporation (BMC) the post amalgamation, state-owned concern that would would become the dreaded British Leyland (BL), and ultimately the Rover Group. Full Set here. These are an MGA at the back, with a Morris Oxford and Austin Healey sports car.

I fear we've had that title before, hey-ho!. Small sample here today, if only because the various elements of stationery-related stuff gets sorted into other areas of the collection, and are mostly in storage.

Nevertheless - there are a few interesting items in this little lot, the carded rubber pencil, small enough for the cavity of a Christmas cracker, the early Gameboy style electronic game with lenticular artwork (which is almost as effective as the graphics in those early games!), the cassette-tape and record player erasers are also rather good, but both are marked Japan, not Hong Kong, which makes all the difference for the era we're looking at here.

I don't really get the key/pen/Biro, but then given some of the novelty pens we got in our Christmas stockings: it's par for the course! The T-shirt eraser is in a very fine rendition of an Ariel box, which would go well in a dolls house and raises the problem of do you 'file' it with the erasers, or the Ariel premiums, or the bag of doll-sized bits!

Friday, December 18, 2015

Both from Christmas crackers, and both quite recent I think...well I sort of know, but I'll explain, I tend not to keep these in their sets...no, that's a lie; I was keeping them in their sets until the big lot came in, at which point I photographed them for posterity - er...this article - and broke them into the 'new' classification bags that resulted from the big sorting and bringing-together of the accumulated tat, kak, shite!

The upper four came together a few years ago at - I seem to recall - a works 'do', where cheap crackers are pretty-much guaranteed! The lower shot group were in the big lot of the autumn, The blue plastic and moulding style (3D relief with flat-edged, hollow undersides) tie them together well.

The ship is an old favourite as a cracker toy, although somewhere I have a bag full of them in red and blue with cavity bases from the Lucky Bag depot fire, insurance clear-out I did back in the 1990's. I keep expecting to find the original in one of the many sets of flat premiums from France, but which appeared all over as food freebies, but they tend to be better detailed, so I think maybe 'just' a cracker/novelty sculpt?

These were in those small tree-decoration crackers a few years ago, but I can't remember where, they were either in Tesco's about 2005/6 or Sainsbury's c.2009/10? or 2013? Anyway, we can be pretty sure there were other items and that they were all available in both colours.

Pretty crude; the highlight for me is the scale-down of the Kellogg's 'Tony the Tiger' keyring...someone in HK must have the original mould or master sculpt, 30/40-odd years after the original last plopped onto the breakfast table.

The rook was seemingly the only chess piece? I have a similar knight from the 70's...why not do a whole set with one of the paper boards we looked at a post or two below? Missed opportunity...set of 16 budget cracker with one back row and one front row piece in each cracker, board printed on the box...Bob's your uncle!

There's a hear-no-evil monkey charm, so the other two may have existed? the rest is typical old gum-ball/cracker fare. Spinners aren't even numbered. The banana is a dolphin!

A great favourite with novelty shite producers and issuers, it works; vaguely, and kids love them, where/why the common key motif though, is a mystery to me, sometimes the multiple sets have actually got different levels of magnification, sometimes it's a stack of identical glasses!

The rest of the games, these are all from Christmas crackers, although some of them will be found in capsule/gum-ball dispensers, while the tube of dice is the sort of thing you'd also find in the pocket-money bins.

Little paper 'board' games, the one a copy of the other, it's not just figures they pirate, everything from brake-pads to Main Battle Tanks have been plagiarised by the Chinese in the last 70 years! Folded small and wrapped around a pack of black and white counters, one of them has a chess/draughts board printed on the other side.

Novelty dice can be very big, or a bit small, but practical sized dice will be found either with the game or in one of the other crackers in a set that includes the paper boards above. This is why you need to pull all the crackers in the box...even if it's just the two of you! Then you get to stack hats, making the 'last one wearing' game all the more exciting...not!

Seen before; these will either be with the game, or a cup (for tiddlywinks) in another cracker from the set. The bag to the left would have come stuffed into a little plastic cup, for playing tiddlywinks, the larger 'thumb' discs used to flick the smaller ones, while the set of all-small ones are for the Snakes & Ladders.

Thursday, December 17, 2015

Found the Jacks! And a few more came in, more of a cracker thing, but they are in larger capsule machines and were always one of the items in the pocket-money bins...

...like the ones in the long tube to the right here. The chrome silver loner may well become the new radar-gizmo on the X-30 Spaceship I was pondering on mending a while ago.

The clay ones came from a little gift shop in Saffron Walden 40-odd years ago and while washed-out by the flash, are nice pastel ice-cream shades, while the wooden one my be a building block or game-playing piece, not a jack at all?

Ring toss and tiddlywinks, classic Christmas cracker fare, the tiddlywinks doubling-up as counters for the paper board games sometimes found in the same sets. Some ring-tossers are scale-downs of garden quoits, the others are enclosed dexterity puzzles.

Wednesday, December 16, 2015

We've still got a few animals to cover, but these are the last of the figural sculpts, although...mostly animals, but in the cartoon or caricature styles of semi-human anthropomorphous!

When trolls get too small for hair! I think I have some of these very small ones in storage WITH hair, but these have eschewed hair for charm loops. The mouse has painted eyes, and is another common 'trope' with capsule toys at the cheap end of the market.

The capsule market has two parameters, first the size of the capsule which used to be in inches (1", 2" and 3" etc...) but is now in mm's with 30mm equating to the old 1" capsules and so on. The second variable is the target price, even now they start at 20p here in the UK (approximately E0.30 or ¢), so something as cheap as these would be in a 1"/20p mixture.

Long, long before Kinder did their little families or sets of catoonish animals, these had come out of both Hong Kong and Japan, carded in sets as well as singly from gum-ball machines, and other sets included dogs, pandas, brown bears etc... These cats are loosely referential toward earlier cats in animation such as Felix, Fritz and Figaro.

Couple of complete Res Plastics (RP) / Kinder figures and one of the most copied of all figures ever, the Britains farm hand, I have this figure in a dozen or more sizes and herds of versions.

Animated playthings, Marx had a set of Disney characters in this style and Britains briefly had the Twizzle Town figures, who's were first I couldn't say, but the bear on the left still turns up in cheap crackers, while the elephant-headed Mickey mouse (gloves/boots?) is from the 1970's and probably based on the Marx set. Kinder have produced similar 'anima[not]tronics'!

The last of the real kak - if you're a male figure collector - but there will be a bit in the final round-up, I was actually looking at crackers in town today, and there are some things that haven't been covered at all, simply because there weren't any in the big purchase, nor any kicking around....tape measures spring to mind, but now'; it's badges and the rest of the Jewellery samples.

Butterfly broach: already converted to a fridge magnet and added to someone else's collection. More badges and broaches top left, necklace/wrist/ankle-chains and the like to their right and a fetching selection of polyethylene earrings in the bottom corner!

The large red one with the clip-in clear dome is heading for the unknown space-ships tub eventually. Round spinners are a pain if they 'fall' or stop between numbers, the pale one is only marked 1-4 which makes it a bit easier and suggests it is from an actual board game which only required low numbers?

Likewise the gold one which has nine sides but only 3 scores: 1, 2 and X. It also seems to be missing a grab-point which must push into the recess? The rest are standard gum-ball or cracker fare. The packeted one is a proper diablo with a draw-string and launching handle.

Tuesday, December 15, 2015

"Trains and boats and planes are passing by, they mean a trip to Paris or Rome, to someone else but not for me. The trains and boats and planes took you away, away from me."

I'm not a great fan of regular 'pop' but some can give you the same nostalgia-hit as old toys, especially at this time of year...cheers Burt!

Again, in storage I have a lot of this stuff, in various sizes, and a whole tub of Kinder railway bits, but this is what's cone-in in the last couple of years. The three little ones at the front are from a Noddy board game and a green one is missing, while the Kinder loco with pantographs is missing a set of horns.

Veering away from thoroughbred cracker and capsule stuff I happen to have these two carded sets kicking about, both The Round House and the Grace Toys brands being made-up-names, I'm guessing; hooks to hang cheap generics on - like Grandmother Stover's, SSCO or Interesting Toy?

Because we've done both micro-vessels and micro-planes to death, there are only a half a handful to look at, and these are they! Kinder airliner, a polyethylene, hollow-underside version of the catapult planes for the dime-store aircraft carrier we looked at a while ago, a micro-ship from mini/decorative tree crackers (maroon), two pleasure cruisers (there are a few in this chaos!) which are cracker toys but were also sold as carded set 'bath toys', along with a modern tug in propylene, similar to the Giodi/Bruder stuff, but unmarked and only two pieces.

A Blue Box copy of a Matchbox 1-75 wrecker with the boom broken-off, an even smaller ethylene copy of same without boom, two ethylene drop-side, flat-beds or vaguely original HK design, two Kinder (middle row), both probably polypropylene, but the cement mixer may be styrene, while the front row are three US dime-store types and a mini gum-ball toy.

The little yellow one in front is from the wharves of the plastic copies of the Tri-ang Minic 'waterline' ships range the vessels for which we've looked at before...as far as I am aware, the die-cast originals didn't have little vehicles, but the piracies do have them parked (with glue) in rows by the warehouses. There's a pantechnicon, an articulated (semi) lorry and this thing which looks like a White's scout car!

A small collection of novelty frogs and a reptile! Playing the banjo! He's quite common and I think I've seen similar sculpts hinting at a set, sort of Marx / Disney knock-offs?

Magnetic novelties are a good standby to keep kids amused for a while and these frogs do spin, frantically, so some clever use of the positive and negative charge there?

The height of mechanical novelty sophistication in the 1970's? Yeah, a lump of bitumen! Now replaced by spring-loaded jumpers, or the types with time-sensitive lick-suckers, these guys rely on the spring sticking to a lump of tar long enough for you to get your hands out of the way!

Actually one of my favourite Christmas cracker novelties, for no particular reason, I guess I just like little pieces of coloured plastic...who'd have guessed!

Skittles...er...that's it - Skittles. The big green one is actually a rattle and should have been with the musical instruments back at the start of the odyssey through polymer shite, but is another cross-over when it comes to classification!

Another lot to be quickly moved over! Actually in their attempts to render the contents of the vending machines of crackers 'unisex', there are some 'masculine' subjects among these, but really this is another corner of the novelty kak universe aimed at the fairer sex.

These were photographed for posterity with the capsule they came with - a time wasting exercise in the main, as the research I've done over the last few weeks would suggest that novelty and capsule are often brought together by wholesaler, sometimes by supplier and there is no firm relationship between the two...however the two top right are 'container specific'.

A decent enough sample, heavy steel rings (with age) at the far left (one, tray like, filled with green glass/enamel), down to a small piece of day-glo tat bottom right. In between there are styrene and ethylene plastics, lightweight aluminium alloys, tin-plate, a lenticular picture-changer, and a couple of daft animal rings (both damaged) along with a pencil-top fruit knock-off!

A close-up of the container specific rings with their locking mechanism, the outer curve of the ring sitting in the slots of a single-piece 'capsule' until prised-out by a fingernail.

Sung in a nasal voice: "She had an horror of rooms...full of toys!"The term 'Rubber Jigglers' tends to brings to mind small hideous finger monsters, usually made of a semi-transparent silicone- or similar-rubber in an orange, flesh or khaki shade, over-sprayed with blobs of colour, maybe with eyes dotted in, but they have a term of their own 'Finger Monsters'!

The jigglers label extending out to various other cheapie toys (confined to capsule/gum-ball machines and shop-stock boxes or cards, rather than the smaller cracker and premiums type novelty sources) made of soft, synthetic-polymer, rubberised materials, which jiggle as they are moved, played with or dangled from an elastic cord.

We looked at a bunch of the sucker-fitted ex-LP sculpt jigglers a while ago, a large ant/bug thing the other day and I'm working on a page for the finger puppets (just because I say they're hideous doesn't mean I don't collect them!), but there are also more realistic jigglers, these constitute a quick overview:

Spiders, lizards (or are they newts?), frogs (not illustrated) a frog-monster, bats, snakes, all firm favourites with the William Brown type schoolboy of any generation in the last 50 years. But; leave them in a styrene capsule too long and they'll eat it with the same power an Airfix Tiger tank's tracks had, to eat their host, in the same era!

This is an early window walker, quite a popular novelty now, they can be much larger with ball extremities to flick-over and walk down the wall. This one on the other hand moves very slowly, and has leaked an unstable fluid into it's instruction-sheet over time, yet remains as sticky as ever! It's also tiny.

Three snakes, one a modern ethylene one (small, pale blue, semi-flat/relief design), you may well find in your cracker in 11 days time, under him is a 1970's classic in stretchy jade-green rubber (the only true jiggler in this trio) and under him is a more realistic 1990's dense PVC model with a half-hearted paint-job. We saw the spiders the other day, but boy; could you get you mother/sister/aunt to scream with a well timed reveal of a jiggling spider!

Saturday, December 12, 2015

I have a load of these in my storage unit in Basingrad, and more de-looped in the various 'unknown' boxes, both here and in storage, so these are pretty much what came in the the recent purchase, a small sample but they give a flavour of what has been available...

...in Gum ball dispensers, Christmas crackers and as carded rack toys of the 'take one' point-of-sale type. The fish I remember from my childhood, they came in silver as well, and in several sizes, my mother had a huge silver neff one, I'll see if she's still got it, that would make a nice post.

The rubber foot is total shite: tuppence worth of material with no practical or play-value at all? The beer stein is really a charm and too small for a key-ring, you'd feel disappointed by that, while the tin football also came printed as a map globe, basket-ball, tennis ball etc...

Figural chains include all the favourites; elephants and dogs here. A pair of poodles, how nasty! The plastic rings are not practical, but the metal ones are usually to 'shop' quality.

Girls get their own plastic shite, unfortunately, when it comes to Christmas crackers; randomly hidden among the useful stuff!

Folding rain-scarf, fortunately granny or mum would always swap you this for whatever they'd one, or just take it and tell you to pull another one with yourself to be sure of winning! The handbags and glove-compartments of several million cars contain at least one of these 'for emergencies'!

Hair brushes, hair-ties, hair-combs, hair-clips and those hair-rake-clip things? If you think this is a hairy post, we've got rings and jewellery to get through yet! But I'm burying them in other stuff!

From the joke dept. Fake lips, lost teeth, eye patches, nails through figers, even - at larger sizes - arrows through heads! Kids love these, adults pretend to be taken in, expressing levels of suprise that do them credit since they've been expecting the trick since it flew from the cracker a hore or two ago!

Hillbilly teeth and vampire fangs join the solo dentoids (spell-check says; you made that word up), 'witches fingers' and moustaches were another favourite, the clips to small for adults - who were nonetheless made to try them!

We actually had that cat-mask (in black) as kids, it hung around for years, each time it appeared it was missing another whisker!

I said we'd come back to charms when we looked at elephants, so lets do that and get them out of the way...

These charms are so common, there are lots of variations and they are based on older phenolic 'ivorene' ones, themselves based on ivory originals. The red one appears to be a bottle (missing its top) which may be a soy-sauce dispenser from take-away food? The red and yellow capsule toy is in two parts, the head plugging into the body.

Looked at these before in depth, so just a quick image of mixed vehicles for the plastic shite season! If you click/follow the 1 Ton Humber Mini Truck tag, you'll get the page with all related articles on these; another favourite of mine.

And more civilian ones than in the original articles, however I have had lots of these come in in the last two years, and after a wash they have mostly now been added to the original articles - I didn't go with the 'pink additions' thing, they are messy enough already.

Friday, December 11, 2015

Skulls and skeletons are great favourites in the world of cheap plastic tat and while you can see it being a Halloween thing, why would anyone imagine you'd want one in a Christmas cracker? But imagine that they do, and act on it...a budget set of 12 crackers will inevitably contain one of these...

...one is dressed-up as a knot puzzle, but basically they are models of flesh-stripped bodies/body parts!

Their most useful job was to decorate my 'Greebo' cut-off as a teenager! It's not clear, but there are three heads on the left pocket-button including one with flourescent orange eyes and a metallic blue one, with another one on the right, he has green 'jewelled' eyes!

Notes on Below Index

For those not used to Blogger, the below 'index' allows you to find similar posts by their content, just click on the label (word) that best suits you search needs. I have tried to label by

- Country of origin of toy- Country represented by toy- Maker- Material- Scale/Size/Ratio- Era represented by toy- Whether subject is civil/military- Other 'themes'Etc...

Re-annotating the index is an ongoing project, in the meantime to save on space (there is a limit on the number of characters and the number of labels) I have started using abbreviations, which are as follows:

Copyright (C) Hugh Walter 2009-2014

The moral and legal right of Hugh Walter to be identified as the author of these works (excepting the layout and code supplied by Blogger/Blogspot and/or their agents) is hereby asserted in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This blog presents images and text subject to the condition that the authored contents shall not, by way of trade or otherwise be lent, sold, hired-out or otherwise circulated publicly in any form, nor should any part of these works be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system (other than the servers of Blogger/Blogspot and/or Google and/or their nominated agents) or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the copyright owner, other than being downloaded by an individual for his own private use and not for subsequent re-publishing in any form whatsoever.

Any individual wishing to re-publish an image should obtain the authors permission by eMail beforehand, stating destination of image and context within which the image is required.